Feb 24/25 - hard to stay on top !

It's difficult to get a blog out when I'm leaving in the wee hours, and by the time I finish one of these rides, my mind is fried, don't know what happened the day before the ride.

That's ok, nothing was really of note anyway.

The ride yesterday was interesting.  It was just the three of us -- Paul, Judith and me -- doing the pre-ride during which Paul takes note of anything that should be fixed/adjusted/updated/improved on the route.  We did find a better place (park) for lunch for the group who will do the ride just over a week from now.

Officially I just did the March 14th ride.  That's how it works.  When those results are posted, I'll be on the list as will Paul and Judith.

It was a slow day.  Paul is still recovering from a bone problem (benign) and Judith hasn't done much cycling the last few months.  On top of that, they both like to spend more time at Controls than me so ... a ride that I've done in 17:45, 19:10, 18:20, 17:25 and 20:13 (2009 through 2013) took 20:55.  Actually that's not as bad as I thought -- we were close to that in 2013.  Huh ... I just had to double-check that ... yes, it took 20:13 in 2013.  I was riding with Jerry that year and he didn't have a great day, but that's understandable since he's doing his first long ride of the year while I'm well into it.

So, I didn't plan it this way but 300k last Saturday, 400k on Wednesday and then another 300k coming up on Saturday.  That's a spread-out 1000k.

I was feeling pretty good yesterday but facing the weather with some trepidation.  It looked like it could rain on and off all day.  It didn't rain at all.  Furthermore, it was a weird day.  Usually the wind dies down and it gets cool with sundown but yesterday it got warmer and extremely windy.  We had about 20 miles into that wind and then about 40 with the wind.  That was a real treat to wind up the day.  Otherwise, I guarantee that we'd be at least an hour longer.  It was the coolest that I've ever ridden this 400k -- kept my long sleeved jersey on all day. 

Having had a reasonably relaxed day, I'm not feeling like a zombie today.  Yes, I was back home late (2:30 a.m.) but not completely wasted.  I should probably have a snooze today but I did get about 4.5 hours sleep to after 7am -- yeah !

Tomorrow the car goes in for service; hope that goes well.  Otherwise we'll be taking the courtesy car to Gainesville for the ride on Saturday and Miami for the flight to Ecuador on Monday !

Onward !